A smart, offbeat detective story with an entertaining but sinuous plot turn.
A private investigator for a law firm uncovers a potential conspiracy when she looks into a man’s fatal high-rise plummet in this psychological thriller.
Chicago private eye Lila Piper has a handful of open cases. Despite her workload, her boss, James Patrick Savage, a personal injury lawyer, enlists Lila to investigate an accidental death. It’s an atypical case for the PI but it’s on behalf of Wisconsin dairy farmer Hans Holzinger, an old friend of Savage’s. Hans’ 33-year-old son, Wolf, died in a 16-story fall from an apartment building in Chicago. He was evidently rappelling to his girlfriend Sofia Castellanos’ apartment via a TV cable that ultimately snapped. But Hans insists that Wolf was an avid climber and would have used a rope. Coincidentally, another man, Louis Breem, fell to his death from a Chicago housing complex at almost the same time as Wolf. Lila starts questioning people involved, including Sofia; Breem’s wife, Angela; and Marina Resnick, who allegedly witnessed Wolf’s death. But Lila quickly realizes that there are CIA links to much of the case, even Hans and his dairy farm rival Gus Ambrosia. This screams conspiracy, especially once Lila suspects an international drug cartel has a part in the matter as well. It seems she may be on the right track when someone threatens her family, and more than one individual she’s interviewed dies. At least one of those deaths is an undisputed murder. Though Lila has a natural talent for deduction, the details of this case eventually become more complicated than she ever could have anticipated. Jane’s (Mondragon, 2016) enthralling and initially conventional detective story gets progressively more complex. Readers learn Lila suffers from “crippling depression”—what she calls a “curse”—that she’s primarily managed with meds and therapy. At the same time, her gradually revealed family history is thorny: Her father went on trial for securities fraud; she lost both parents to cancer; and she’s currently working on a case for her brother, Ulli, an investment banker caught up in a money laundering scheme. But Lila is an intelligent, levelheaded PI, so while some characters scoff at her conspiratorial CIA theory, it’s perfectly logical. She likewise pinpoints a culprit responsible for Wolf’s fall, and her explanation is exhaustive and comprehensible. Supporting characters add to the developing sense of mystery, as some are harboring secrets; others are most likely being deceitful; and Lila has romantic possibilities with two people of varying genders. The work’s prolonged final act is where things truly get convoluted, as a startling genre shift elevates this detective tale into something else entirely. What Lila learns forces her to re-examine her investigation as well as several people and even herself. That said, the author teases the ending throughout the novel, and the elucidating final act, complete with flashbacks, is convincing, even if readers will have an urge to return to Page 1 and read the book again. While some of the later twists suggest drastic changes in the narrative’s direction (or demand further clarification), Jane leaves these revelations vague and open to interpretation.
A smart, offbeat detective story with an entertaining but sinuous plot turn.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-62289-7
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Roquebrune Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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